‘These companies are manipulating vulnerable people’

THE dangers of buying drugs over the internet are only too real for the family of student Liam Brackell.

Liam died at 24 after he resorted to buying anti-depressants off the internet to cure his depression.

Liam had taken ecstasy, cannabis and magic mushrooms at university and later developed mental illness. While revising for his final examinations at Britain’s prestigious Durham University, he ordered large amounts of drugs off the internet, including tranquilliser valium and the painkiller codeine.

Doctors diagnosed Liam as suffering from drug-induced psychosis and he was once confined in a mental health hospital for 72 hours after trying to walk in front of a bus.

In his diary, Liam wrote: “Still getting delusional thoughts - worst fears - dying painfully, having to keep re-living my life again and again, voices encouraging me to kill myself.”

In June 2003, Liam killed himself by walking in front of a train near his home in Wanstead, east London. A subsequent inquest heard he had taken 23 types of prescription drugs by the time he had died.

After the hearing, his mother Sue spoke out against companies who sell prescription drugs on the internet.

Ms Brackell said: “These companies are cynically manipulating vulnerable people who are desperate. If Governments persist in their refusal to address this problem, lives will continue to be destroyed by unscrupulous profiteers who are given free reign to peddle and push their drugs.

“I knew that Liam was taking an enormous number of different drugs, possibly as many as nine varieties, and I was really scared so I put all my efforts into trying to reason with him and prevent him. I felt I was tiny compared to the internet. It’s an invisible enemy.”

She has called on the British Government to address the problem of unregulated websites selling drugs.

“We want them closed down. I don’t think there’s any way of stopping them re-opening though.”